“In the first fall at 6pm on August 21, 2006, Ms Hargreaves was going to get cough medicine from the fridge in her sock-clad feet…. The tribunal found both falls ‘arose out of Ms Hargreaves’ employment with Telstra’ which made them workplace injuries. Legal experts said the ruling could force employers to conduct workplace health and safety audits in the homes of the one-in-four Queenslanders who regularly work from their private residence for lifestyle reasons.” A law professor said employers “should not enter lightly into home work arrangements” because homes are “inherently dangerous places,” while a labor union spokeswomen said employers should not be able to “contract out” of safety and health obligations. [Courier-Mail; my related take a while back]
5 Comments
I’m looking forward to the court cases where an employer denies a telecommuting request because the employee’s home presents a safety risk, and is promptly sued for unfairly denying a telecommuting request…
Next, your home as workplace has to be ADA compliant even though you are not disabled and see no clients. Prepare to add ramps, elevators and other expensive goodies in order to work from your own home now.
Crikey.
There was an honorable movement to restrict “homework” a century ago when it meant starvation-wage textile workers crammed into dark, unsafe, and unsanitary tenements.
Modern office work, however, is usually more benign. Australian home-workers may have to organize politically to roll back prohibitively expensive legal standards, just as US homeschoolers organized in the 1980s to roll back attempts to regulate them like public schools.
Nevins raises an interesting point about creeping ADA requirements; does Australia have an equivalent to the “Americans with Disabilities Act”?
Many Unions disapprove of homework as it makes it hard to organize the workers and so they lobby for regulations like this in an attempt to force workers back to the central workplace.